WOW! What a terrific question from Edge.org:
What have you changed your mind about? Why?
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert: "In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them. When subjects in our experiments ... couldn't undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. ... I had always believed that love causes marriage. But these experiments suggested to me that marriage could also cause love."
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: "Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature...and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe ... the history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal ... Those that survive do so despite Her indifference ... There is nothing about natural selection that suggests our optimal design ... Mother Nature is not now, nor has she ever been, looking out for us."
Kevin Kelly, author of New Rules for the New Economy: "Much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia ... I knew from my own 20-year experience online that ... an aggregation of random contributions would be a total mess ... How wrong I was ... The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable ... When you grow up knowing rather than admitting that such a thing as the Wikipedia works; when it is obvious to you that open source software is better; when you are certain that sharing your photos and other data yields more than safeguarding them—then these assumptions will become a platform for a yet more radical embrace of the commonwealth ... Its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible."
Futurist Peter Schwartz: "In the last few years I have changed my mind about nuclear power. I used to believe that expanding nuclear power was too risky. Now I believe that the risks of climate change are much greater than the risks of nuclear power ... Furthermore, human skill and knowledge in managing a nuclear system are only likely to grow with time."
OK. Truth-telling time. What have YOU changed your mind about?